As Matt Labash wrote in the Weekly Standard: “For me, the Ron Paul Revolution is like a cozy winter fire. From a distance, the crackling flames of individual liberty and freethinking libertarianism take the chill off sterile two-party politics. But get too near the searing embers, and they will cause blistering, profuse sweating, and all-around general discomfort.”

While there’s plenty of journalistic snark on this issue, similar questions about Paul’s mixed group of supporters have also come from within. The New York Times profile quoted a revealing 2007 e-mail in which the organizer of a Ron Paul meet-up group in Pasadena asked for advice from Paul’s campaign headquarters:

“We’re in a difficult position of working on a campaign that draws supporters from laterally opposing points of view, and we have the added bonus of attracting every wacko fringe group in the country. And in a Ron Paul Meetup many people will consider each other ‘wackos’ for their beliefs whether that is simply because they’re liberal, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, evangelical Christian, etc. . . . We absolutely must focus on Ron’s message only and put aside all other agendas, which anyone can save for the next ‘Star Trek’ convention or whatever.

Scandals and controversy:

In 1992, several issues of Ron Paul’s newsletter published racist remarks attributed to him, including the lines "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” and "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."

During the 1996 elections, these remarks were brought forward and Paul stood by them, saying they weren’t racist. But in 2001, he told the Texas Monthly that he himself had not written those phrases, but that he had been advised to take responsibility for the comments anyway—an explanation that the Texas Monthly’s Sam Gwynne found largely credible.